TITLE OF THE PUBLICATION
“Può un font essere uno strumento compensativo per i lettori con dislessia?”
SURNAME AND NAME OF AUTHOR(S)
Christina Bachmann
PLACE AND DATE OF PUBLICATION
Edizioni Centro Studi Erickson, Trento, maggio 2013
TYPE OF PUBLICATION
Newspaper / Magazine article
LANGUAGE OF THE DOCUMENT
Italian
LANGUAGE OF THE REVIEW
English
THEMATIC AREA
Students with learning difficulties
DESCRIPTION OF CONTENTS
This study gathers the opinions of first degree elementary and secondary school students diagnosed with dyslexia, disortography and difficulty reading and/or writing who were asked to comment on the EasyReading font through a special questionnaire. In a first phase of this research, 89 pupils were asked if they prefer a font specially designed for them, called EasyReading. In the second phase of the present study, to verify if the reading performance of good readers and dyslexic children may be affected by changing the font, the researchers asked 664 fourth grade pupils (107 were foreign children) attending the primary school to compare two different texts of different lengths in the Times New Roman and EasyReading fonts and to evaluate various characteristics. Then they divided the group into 4 subgroups according to the skill of reading and they reported speed and accuracy of the whole group and divided in subgroups. The results of the questionnaire showed that elementary and secondary school students preferred the EasyReading for its reading ease, visibility of the letters, font thickness and visibility of the punctuation. Moreover, this study shows that there is no statistically significant difference between evaluations of students with LSD and students with learning difficulties but without a diagnosis.
Given the results, the researchers can state that the EasyReading font can be considered a compensating tool for readers with dyslexia and a simplifying font for all categories of readers.
COMMENTS ON THIS PUBLICATION
This article is very interesting because it deals with a new useful compensating tool, the EasyReading font, for readers with dyslexia and for students with learning difficulties. This publication offers a clear presentation of the research which is divided in two phases.
Each phase is well described and rich of effective charts and examples of texts written in the two different fonts.
This interesting research was conducted by Centro Risorse of Prato (Italy) under the supervision of Dr. Christina Bachmann. It confirms that statistically and clinically, the EasyReading font is a valid aid for dyslexic readers and helpful for all readers. This particular font is also approved by the Italian Dyslexia Association due to its specific design characteristics that make reading easier for dyslexic people.
The researchers have chosen Angelo Manzoni’s EasyReading font because it is publicized as a font that solves the crowding effect thanks to wider spaces between letters, between words, between words and punctuation and between lines of texts that make reading easier than the Times New Roman one. Moreover this article highlights how this new font can solve the problem of switching letters and numbers with similar shapes because it has special “serifs” that help avoid mistaking a letter or number for another. Another important characteristics of the Easyreading font is that it offers a complete range of letters and accents and so it covers the alphabet of all Neo-Latin languages.
Name of Compiler
Patrizia Simonetti
Name of Institution
I.P.S.I.A “G. Fascetti” Pisa
Role in the institution
teacher
